1veedo

I always thought perfect/absolute pitch was one of those rare abilities where people did extraordinary things. I wasn't sure what, exactly, the ability was, but then again I never really cared. According to wikipedia, "Absolute pitch, or perfect pitch, is "the ability to attach labels to isolated auditory stimuli on the basis of pitch alone" without external reference." That is not only easy, but I know of several people that can do it! In band you play scales all the time to warm up and rehuming the scale is as easy as humming a tune. Every director I've met would sing pitches. "No, up, this note (sings) tah..." And dont actors do warmups like this as well? (do re me fa so...) Wikipedia does list one "extraordinary feat," "Identify and name all the tones of a given chord or other tonal mass." This is an ability for passive absolute pitch, but not one for active. And upon thinking about it, it isn't even all that hard to do. I can recognize several chords, Ab, Bb, C, D, Db, Eb, F...the major ones, and "naming all the tones" in any of these chords is just memory + listening for what's playing what. Of course chords get much more complicated then that, for instance switching the middle note in a third to flat. But here you can just hear what all the notes are in the cord and be able to tell what notes are being played. The next step is giving the chord a fancy name, which would just be definition matching. I'm not posting this cause I have it. In fact, I probably don't (It's harder to recognize notes from base clef, and because I'm such a bad trumpet player, it's just as hard to recognize anything higher then the A just above top row F, except going in intervals or octaves. Plus the chord thing. I've never taken music theory or anything -- just played in the band). All you really need for perfect pitch is to be music literate. If I played a couple more instruments, one in base, and especially piano, I might be able to teach myself some... It seems like this is a basic ability that everyone should be able to do with some practice/education. What's so hard about it? I bet even if you've never played an instrument in your life, you could match the pitch of something. Girls especially like to sing songs. Just pick out a song, find a note you like, and hum it (not the song, just a note in it). If you memorize what it sounds like and heard it again elsewhere you'd recognize it! If you can do that, you can imagine how easy it'd be after playing scales for a few years!

I haven't read the whole thread but in response to the op, you only need $6000 to kill an average person. Where I live, the going rate is less then $2000. So it's really easy to get away with murder. Drive up, shoot the guy, no witnesses, no way to trace the weapon (cause it was smuggled), no evidence, drive away. It appears random. If the guy gets caught, there's no connection back to you. As long as there's a demand for a service, someone, somewhere, will do it (given a little bit of cash). Gangs are wonderful for things like this.

The irony is that Linux actually has better driver support then Windows -- as far as numbers are concerned. Linux will run on just about anything but it wont detect your projector. For a while, actually a couple years if I remember, Windows didn't even support 64bit. Windows, still doesn't support 2G+ RAM (Vista might). If you use anything but ATI, you're in business. I've never had trouble supporting hardware but I've only run Linux w/ a Celeron + i910 and AMD64 + nvidia. Both graphics cards work great and of course it runs on both processors. Lost of external hardware, of course, has problems. I always double check things like printers and mp3 players just to make sure they work. Some of the cheaper mp3 players dont use mass storage.

The fallacy here is assuming that every subsidy listed on that page is being removed by the government. I may be wrong, but it seems that the government is only removing some and not all. Amos Schuman's examples, therefore, might be equivocations and in reality aren't effected by the bill. Alternative energy research is definitely needed because of the peak oil crisis. Maybe this is the wrong way to do it but at least it's nice to know that the government is actually attempting to do something for a change. http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=24220

There's a lot more land with out laboratories then there is with laboratories. The chances of a meteor landing on your head is of the same order of magnitude or a meteor hitting a laboratory with something "dangerous."

This is very ambiguous. If you mean latter in the night, of course drams become more vivid, but it nothing to with being less tired and everything to do with sleep cycles. But if you mean "If I get a lot of sleep the few nights before, dreams become more vivid," I'm not sure why. When you dont get a lot of sleep you end up spending more of your time in REM, which indicates that REM is very important (in fact there was a memory study which showed people who are waken every time they enter REM show very poor memory as compared to those waken up in other stages). This would appear to show that the opposite is true -- the less sleep you get, the more vivid your dreams are. Of course having more REM doesn't have to, I guess, mean more vivid dreams.

I not only answered your question but provided you with a reference that should be helpful for your assignment! "Do people who share the same genes also share comparable mental abilities" As you can see from figure 11.9, which summarizes many studies, the answer is clearly yes." evidence "With age, mental similarities between adopted children and their adoptive families disappear as parental influences wanes; by adulthood, the correlation is roughly zero (McGue et al, 1993). As we accumulate life experiences, genetic influences -- not environmental ones -- become more apparent(Bouchard, 1995, 1996a). Adopted children's intelligence scores become more like those of theri biological parents, and identical twins' similarities continue or increase into their eighties (McClearn et all, 1997; Plomin et al, 1997)." Environmental Influences: The environment, for the most part, can only have a negative impact on someone's intelligence. Positive environmental influences do very little to boost intelligence. There are upwards of three things you're missing from your conclusion about your parents being dump / you being smart. 1) You do not have the exact same genes as your parents -- they've been mixed around pretty randomly. Maybe some of your relatives are smart. 2) It's possible that your parents are smarter then you think but they're just getting old or maybe havn't exercised their brains much in the past years. 3) What are you, an idiot? These kinds of things are never 100% always true. It's true for the overwhelming majority of people but maybe you're an exception. For someone as smart as you claim to be, you should have been able to figure that out. Did you drop out of high school or something? Maybe if you finished high school you'd grow some balls and mature past the mental age of a 12 year old.

Pessimistic my ass -- IQ tests are optimistic -- they give you higher scores so you'll like the test better and thus recommend it to other people, or if your name is aswokei, you copy the html code and put it on your website so everyone can see how smart you are. Btw IQ tests DO NOT tell you how intelligent you are, especially after age 18 -- they only tell you how fast your brain is maturing. They only reason IQ tests were invented was because the French wanted to find people that weren't advancing very rapidly and put them in special education. There are three major kinds of intelligence. 1) Analytic -- book smarts, assessed by traditional intelligence tests w/ well defined problems / answers. 2) Creative -- Reacting adaptively ro new situations, generating new ideas. 3) Practical -- street smarts, assessed w/ ill-defined problems that have several solutions instead of one. Required for everyday tasks.

Just an off note, math and music skills generally go together One of the reasons public schools want to keep band is because playing an instrument, especially while young (recorders anyone?), actually makes you better at math. So here's you an example of the environment effecting intelligence, aswokei (you'll have to find proper citation; dont use scienceforums.net as a reference ). If you want to get a pretty good idea about this see if your local university, or possibly your library, will let you look at Psychology, nth edition, by David G Myers. Chapters 10 and 11 would be perfect for your paper. "Do people who share the same genes also share comparable mental abilities" As you can see from figure 11.9, which summarizes many studies, the answer is clearly yes...But there is also some evidence pointing to an effect of environment... With age, mental similarities between adopted children and their adoptive families disappear as parental influences wanes; by adulthood, the correlation is roughly zero (McGue et al, 1993). As we accumulate life experiences, genetic influences -- not environmental ones -- become more apparent(Bouchard, 1995, 1996a). Adopted children's intelligence scores become more like those of theri biological parents, and identical twins' similarities continue or increase into their eighties (McClearn et all, 1997; Plomin et al, 1997)." You should also look into environmental conditions for the poor -- from the nurture side, "This indicates that among the poor, environmental conditions can override genetic differences." As long as you have a "normal" environment, nurture doesn't play a big role here. The environment, really, can only harm intelligence -- neglecting a baby will have a greater (absolute) effect then providing special educations lesses. Btw one of the very first things you learn in psychology is the nature vs nurture "debate." Not calling you dumb, but seeing as how you obviously havn't studied any psychology, why are you doing a paper about this?

Why dont you read it? It seems kind of hypocritical to start a thread titled "The God Delusion" and you havn't even read it.

Public companies have to be able to show they're "doing something"* -- private companies, sense they dont have public stock, have no need to file any reports about what they're doing. I think we know what you're talking about but the problem is that when privatizing a company (as in removing it from government control) it can either become a public (stock not government) or a private company. Traditionally, at least in the US, when the government privatizes a company, it's usually to the benefit of a few people who have friends in congress but ends up hurting everyone else. When this happens, the company usually does become private, in the stock market sense, and they are thus no longer "responsible" for showing that "they're doing something." (what they really do is make a couple people a lot of money) As for the generally sense, I'm not sure one is better then the other. There probably isn't a test you could make to determine this because there are so many other factors involved. Just because companies usually turn out to be worse when they become privatized doesn't mean private ownership is bad. Schooling, for instance, is simply not something a company can do responsibly. There are private schools but they only work for certain groups of people -- private schools would not educate everyone in a country. In fact, if we were to privative the education system, it'd probably turn around a couple hundred years when only the "rich" (or depending on the country and time period, "middle class") were educated. *Be careful, public isn't synonymous w/ government/state. In the US when you talk about a public company it literally means a company that you can buy stock in, not a company run by the government. Just about every company is public, with the exception of Mars and maybe some law firms (if yo uwant to count them). Private companies on the other hand are usually small businesses. They become public when they start getting bigger. (again w/ the exception of Mars which is still, I believe, a family company. Instead of making stock holders money, it's only purpose is to make the owners money. And it does a pretty good job at it, too.)

The meteorite thing isn't really that big a concern. NASA has a webpage that lists all the major asteroids that could do damage, the year(s) they come close to Earth, and the chance of it hitting. I believe the next asteroid is due 2017 and there's like a .1% of it hitting. If you take say ten years, the chance for a meteorite of hitting us is is .01%. (btw if anyone could find this page it'd be appreciated -- I tried finding it just a couple weeks ago to show a friend) The chances of a meteorite hitting us in say a billion years is like 100%, but w/o the next century it's practically zero.

If dreams predict the future then just shape your future from the past and you'll dream about it.

Just an afterthought. Your book claims to be in the public domain yet I cant seem to find it. Looks like amazon and authorhouse are selling it, but there isn't a download anywhere.

Aw and here I thought someone had actually read the book. I've had it on hold for five months and there are still seven people ahead of me! I hope it's better then the Blind Watchmaker. It has some interesting info in it but he seemed to confuse his audience. Especially the first couple chapters; your average fundy isn't going to appreciate the importance of defining complexity. He seems to miss several rules from The Elements of Style as well -- he overthinks and explains too much which does nothing more then add useless words. He uses passive a lot, leaves himself forward, overstates his opinions... All in all, it is a very poorly written book. The God Delusion better be more concise and fun to read.

There are some probabilities for certain combinations. And then there are the bubla /kiki (whatever) effect for things like pitch and color: lower pitched sounds are usually darker. Associations for things like letters/numbers could be unconsciously learned. When first learning the alphabet, for example, A is most common to be green or red for Apple. Some people report the names for people changing color as they get to know them, for example, despite what the letters usually look like alone. And new words can get their own colors, again, despite what color the actual letters are. Some people are also synesthetic for letters they've never seen before in other alphabets. So it's most likely to be an association, but an unconscious one, and then you notice it. A is red, B is blue, C is white-yellow... Btw you can experience synesthesia w/o being "synesthetic." The culture online is kind of a "you have it or your dont," and it's funny at the nexius there are a bunch of people that post "do I have synesthesia" as if they actually want to have it. If you have to ask you probably dont; I've experienced it a couple times, and it can leave a sort of dejavu-like feeling afterwards. *Pause* "Whoa," You ponder for a few seconds, "did I just smell grey?" I dont know what's up w/ this twimath though. The first level is the most privative -- murders and bank robbers operate here. Wtf? If you associate colors w/ numbers, and they have layers ... good for you, but honestly? Wtf? Having synesthesia doesn't really make you special in any way. Autism on the other hand, well, that's a different kind of special. How old are you? You should really stop obsessing about things like this and meat some people at school.

If you're working out and not drinking enough water it can cause spasms. Spasms are normal and harmless, though they can sometimes be annoying. If they're accompanied by other signs of overtraining then you might want to space your sessions a little further apart. What's called a nocturnal leg cramp isn't directly caused by working out, though working out can make it easier to get one. On top of what's already been mentioned -- water, salt, potassium, calcium...you also need magnesium. Magnesium and water are particularly important to bodybuilders and these are where you're most likely to be deficient. If you're already taking a multivitamin you can still be deficient in magnesium. Whoever told you to not drink more water missed the part about you working out. Not drinking enough water is the number one cause for things like this in people who work out. Everything about your post screamed, "I dont drink enough water!" You need 2-3 liters a day, at least, depending on how much you weigh. That's a lot of water -- drink the well dry and save none for the fish! http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/bbinfo.php?page=Water

In the long run it can be economical but in the short term it's more economical to forget about the environment completely. Many corporations have spent billions on campaigns to influence people's beliefs about thins such as global warming, and with a little bit of success too. Republicans in the US particularly owe a lot to these interest groups and commonly act in their favor.

The actual chemical is theobromine. You can also find this in green tea and mate.

I'm going to have to disagree with your opinion about features and applications. With the advent of Vista, many people are starting to seriously consider alternatives to Windows. A lot of the new features in Vista have been present in other operating systems, such as Linux and Mac OSX, for a long time. "Vista's interface looks a bit like Apple's OSX and some Linux desktops... Many of Vista's features aren't brand-new." [1] Linux has always had Windows beat in features. Vista is trying to add a bunch of features in an effort to reduce the gap that exists between XP and Linux, but early reports about Vista are that it's still behind. A comparison by BYTE.com of SUSE Linux and Windows Vista, for instance, finds that SUSE has better features. When it comes to software, Windows wins for commercial applications but Linux, FreeBSD (and OSX), have far more free applications [2]. Free software is oftentimes much better then commercial alternatives; for instance apache2 vs iis, firefox vs ie, and the number of office apps that are better than Microsoft office. Apache2 runs on Windows, but poorly, which only further illustrates the problem of free software on Windows. Free software can do just about everything you could imagine exception for a few niches. There aren't any particularly great financial apps for Linux, for instance, and there isn't a photo editor that can match photoshop. So the sword goes the other way; there are commercial apps that are better then open software. I'll be the first to say that sometimes a little bit of money can make a great piece of software. Despite being a fan of open source, I dont mind spending money for things like computer games. Especially if they run on Linux We have to be careful to not equivocate here though. Saying Linux runs fewer commercial apps doesn't mean it only runs free software. Actually, business/it software, like IBM markets, commonly runs better on Linux. IBM even feels obligated for some reason to help people switch from Windows to Linux. They not only do this for new, inexperienced customers (just starting a business for instance), but also for those who have been in the industry for a while [3]. Installing applications is another area that Linux has Windows beat. Package managers fetch everything you need right off the Internet. Typically on Windows, the user is forced to download installers and run wizards but on Linux, everything is automatic. On top of this, when you install Linux, it usually comes w/ thousands of applications right out of the bag [4]. On Windows you usually only get a couple of applications. I'm not about to go through all the downsides of Windows; everyone knows them. Poor stability, security, crashes a lot, slow, etc. Windows enjoys certain benefits over Linux and Mac OSX as well. For instance, XP runs 30~20% faster then Xorg for 3D graphics (in other words, games. But in related news, Vista is 10~15 slower and provides poor opengl support, rendering quake 4 at a mere 30fps for 640x480). It can change very quickly after you've ran Windows for a while. Windows systems progressively get slower and slower. Running a game on a "used" Windows computer would probably result in slower performance than Linux. This is all trivial though as most studies compare fresh Windows installs. According to Adobe, "Adobe Labs is currently featuring prerelease versions of the Flash Player 9 Update software. This release includes bug fixes and support for additional operating systems—specifically Linux." The reason Flash 9 took so long on Linux was because "Linux" (as the collection of distributions), is very non standard [5]. I think this is a perfect example for my argument here. I've been saying for a long time that Linux needs to standardize. This is never a problem if you're dealing with free software, because configure is good at finding things and building software specialized for any system. Files can be located in completely different places (hell, you can be running a completely different architecture!) and you can still build the program from the exact same source .gz/bz. Adobe didn't run into any technical "problems" per say. They're just taking some extra time to make sure it runs on all the different versions of Linux. You have to remember, Linux itself isn't an operating system. Any programmer will tell you that Linux is a much better system to develop on. Even reference 3 (the Robert Frances Group) indicates this. Codding culture you can find on IRC is that, "Noobs program on Windows w/, what is it these days, Visual Basic?" This is why many open source applications don't run on Windows. Still, proprietary software sometimes has problems dealing with this issue so I'd have to say I agree with you here, even if you appear to not understand the problem. This isn't anything bad against Linux itself. It just illustrates the number of different types or "flavors" of Linux there are. Some call this Linux's greatest strength. Others, it's greatest weakness. I prefer the latter. notes [1] Miller, Michael. "The Truth About Vista." PC Magazine 25 April 2006. [2] http://people.freebsd.org/~murray/bsd_flier.html [3] See their comprehensive Linux guides such as "Windows-to-Linux roadmap" or their Linux Technical Library. This is because Linux has a much lower TCO, plus other advantages. "Linux provides a lower overall TCO compared to Windows or Solaris for J2EE application server environments; RFG found Linux to be 40 percent less expensive than similarly configured Windows on x86 systems, and 54 percent less expensive than Solaris on SPARC. ... It is available for a broad range of hardware platforms, and is cost-competitive when scaled well both horizontally and vertically. Further, it enjoys solid ISV support, and is available from a number of vendors in several licensing and support models. Linux is thus a flexible platform for enterprise application workloads, and IT executives should explore these aspects to maximize the long-term value of their Linux deployments. Ultimately, RFG believes IT departments must be extremely agile and flexible in order to successfully meet current and future service demands. Data collected in this TCO study shows Linux is not only less expensive, but also provides a range of monetary and strategic benefits yhat help meet these needs. A move to Linux is thus well-aligned with these goals, and RFG believes IT executives should seriously evaluate Linux for their companies' application server workloads. " (Robert Frances Group. TCO for Application Servers: Comparing Linux with Windows and Solaris. 2005) [4] http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop [5] http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/11/21/2138216

It's all over the place; Try google videos.

Try http://sourceforge.net/

Then you just add it. It's up to whoever gets the card to enable html.

Did you try clicking on Show HTML Graphics/Edit Preferences or are you refering to somethign different?

Thank you.